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Introduction

Public support to university researchers and students who are in the process of starting businesses is receiving increasing worldwide attention as an essential and more prevalent part of selective public innovation and environmental policy spending. The effectiveness of these support measures is often taken for granted. This study discusses long-standing experiences of active innovation support and incubator support and raises the following questions: How can an even more effective local innovation support system be built in order to foster innovations and spinoffs from universities more efficiently? What explicit, valid program theories—theoretical generalizations that connect policy interventions to desired outcomes—can be constructed? The chapter is divided into three main sections: First, an empirical section briefly describes the innovation support system linked to Umeå University: The innovation office, three majority-owned business incubators, and a business angel network that interacts with the academic entrepreneurs during the whole startup process, exhibiting different modes of support. Second, a theoretical section

D. Hjalmarsson (*) Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden

© The Author(s) 2022